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Ackley Brothers Lumber Company Nine Brothers Lumber Company Wheeler-Olmstead Lumber Company |
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The former Wheeler-Olmstead Shay stored derelict at Macdoel, CA, on 15 June 1936. D.S. Richter photo.
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This page will give brief overviews of the smaller railroad logging operations in the Klamath Basin. Ackley Brother Lumber Company Brothers John and Harry Ackley purchased and moved to Klamath Falls a mill in 1904. Their Ackley Brothers company obtained timberlands around Keno, Oregon, located a little over fifteen miles down the Klamath River. Animals originally dragged logs to the rivers edge, where they would be dumped into the water and assembled into log rafts which would then be pulled up the river to the mill. However, by 1912 the distances became great enough that the company decided it needed a railroad to move logs the even increasing distance to the river. The company first built about two miles of track extending south of the river that was in use until roughly 1915, followed by a longer railroad approximately four miles in length running north from the river that lasted until some undetermine point. A couple flatcars powered by gravity would move the logs down to the river, with teams of horses and later a Rambler automobile retrofitted to run on the railroad used to pull them back up to the landings. Ackley Brothers apparently found and relied on other ways to move the logs to the mill after their foray into railroad logging ended. The Shaw family, formerly of the Shaw-Bertram Lumber Company, purchased the Ackley mill in 1943 and ran it until 1995 as the Modoc Lumber Company. It proved to be the longest running sawmill in the basin. Nine Brothers In 1924, Marion Nine became involved in the Shasta View Lumber and Box Company, which built a mill in Klamath Falls. Marion, operating with his brothers Wilbur and Preston as the Nine Brothers, would handle at least some of the logging for this operation, which was focused around several different stations on the Oregon, California & Eastern Railroad. Nine Brothers leased a locomotive from the OC&E to help switch some of the landings they established along the line, mostly at Swan Lake and Sprague River. The company did build one railroads of its own, extending about a mile and a half off the OC&E main near the West Switchback and near the switch for the Shaw-Bertram and Big Lakes logging railroad. The railroad operated for around 1925-1926 and used a locomotive leased from the OC&E. Wheeler-Olmstead Lumber Company In 1922 a Portland banker named J.E. Wheeler partnered with one Emery Olmstead to form the Wheeler-Olmstead Lumber Company. Wheeler-Olmstead bought a mill north of Klamath Falls adjacent to the Pelican Bay Lumber Company mill that had financially collapsed the prior year. The company initially built a short spur off the Southern Pacific main line near Lenz north of Klamath Falls, where a used McGiffert loader loaded logs onto flatcars for the trip to the mill. Wheeler-Olmstead is not reported to have operated this railroad directly, but it's unclear who did. That operation lasted until 1925, when the company shifted to sourcing logs rafted from various places around Klamath Lake or loaded onto railcars at various points on the Oregon, California & Eastern Railroad. In late 1926 Wheeler-Olmstead secured a block of timber west of Kirk and started negotiating with Southern Pacific to place a switch for their proposed railroad, over which the company planned to deliver twenty cars of logs a day for somewhere between two and five years. SP approved the switch, and Wheeler-Olmstead bought a used two-truck Shay, but the plans progressed no further as in mid-1927 both Wheeler and Olmstead were charged with various financial crimes and their lumber company declared bankruptcy. Several creditors ended up with the property, and the Shay and McGiffert loader were leased to several other operators in the basin over the next several years. |
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Maps |
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Overview map showing locations of the Ackley Brothers, Nine Brothers, and Wheeler-O;mstead lumber company operations.
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Locomotive Roster 2- Lima 2-Truck Shay, c/n 1946, Built 1907. Cylinders 11x12, Drivers 32", Weight 45 tons. Built as Clearfield Lumber Company (Moorehead & North Fork Railroad) #2, Moorehead, KY; to Clyde Equipment Company, Portland, OR; to Anderson & Middleton Lumber #7, Cottage Grove, OR; to Wheeler-Olmstead Lumber, Kirk, OR; to F. Hill Hunter, Klamath Falls, OR. Hunter subsequently leased the locomotive to Braymill-White Pine Lumber; Shaw-Bertram Lumber; and finally Walker-Hovey Lumber at Macdoel, CA. Abandoned at Macdoel by 1936 and scrapped sometime thereafter. |
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